The first time director and writer Mitchell Lichtenstein heard of the mythic "vagina dentata" - toothed vagina - was in a Bennington College class taught by social critic and feminist Camille Paglia. When he sat down to write his first feature film, Lichtenstein researched that fearsome monster. The resulting film, "Teeth," premiered to great buzz at the Sundance Film Festival last year.

It's fitting that the controversial Paglia was the creative inspiration for Lichtenstein (she also contributed to one scene, writing the text of a Google search on vagina dentata) because the film sits somewhere between feminist fairy tale, bold cultural critique and gory comedy.

"It's kind of different," says Lichtenstein, who lives in New York. "Most movies get channeled into one genre or another by the time they're made, even if they tweak or play with genres, but I never felt obligated to do that. It's not one genre. It's horror, it's coming of age. But if someone put a gun to my head and made me choose, I'd say, 'Dark comedy.' "

"Teeth" stars Jess Weixler as Dawn, a pretty blond high school student who is the leader of a Christian teen group committed to chastity. She lives with her terminally ill mother, her stepfather and her snarling stepbrother, Brad (John Hensley of "Nip/Tuck"), who spends most of his time in his bedroom with his long-suffering goth girlfriend and his caged pit bull. Brad is a bad, bad seed.

From the beginning, it's clear that Dawn is special. The opening sequence shows a game of "I'll show you mine if you show me yours" gone awry, as young Brad gets his finger lopped off by the cherubic Dawn. It's only a matter of time before Dawn gets curious about her body. Even as she delivers a speech on the importance of "saving your greatest gift" until marriage, she has locked eyes with the handsome Tobey (Hale Appleman). It's a countdown until her teeth are bared.

Lichtenstein says he intended the film as a commentary on the metaphoric power the vagina dentata myth still exerts on contemporary imaginations, and he didn't have to stray too far from modern headlines to find evidence that Americans have trouble discussing female genitalia. In one scene, a large gold sticker is shown over the science book anatomy drawings of the female reproductive organ, while nothing covers the male equivalent - a real situation that Lichtenstein found happened in Virginia in 2000.

And even when, to use a popular word, "vajayjays" aren't actual killers, Lichtenstein says, images of vagina dentata are easily found in all kinds of movies and literature. As he learned from Paglia, the Greek Medusa monster is an inverted vagina dentata - the head is transposed - and in every iteration of vagina dentata stories, the female creature has to be smitten by a more powerful man.

"It's very clear this is a male problem," he says. "This says very little about women, but quite a lot about men."

In "Teeth," it's the woman who turns out to be the hero, or at least the mistress of her domain. Lichtenstein says the subject matter of the film has attracted some unlikely fans - Howard Stern can't stop talking about it, for instance - but the filmmaker knew that horror buffs would dig the physical humor.

All joking (and a perhaps unprecedented number of prosthetic penises) aside, Lichtenstein is aiming at a deeply held strain of misogyny.

"In doing interviews, I had one reporter tell me he'd have to find a euphemism for 'vagina' because his paper wouldn't print it," says Lichtenstein, who is the son of artist Roy Lichtenstein and has acted in movies and television. "Can you imagine?"

As for the perennial difficulty in securing funding for controversial independent films, Lichtenstein says that he didn't even think of shopping his movie to a major studio or big indie production house.

"I knew I wasn't going to get money from the usual channels," he says, noting that he put some of the money up himself. "No one was really going to finance" a movie about a killer vagina.

And would "Teeth" pass the Friday-night date movie test?

"Someone asked me recently if it was a date movie," Lichtenstein says. "At first, I thought, 'Well, it would be a last-date movie.' But then I thought, 'Actually, it would be a good date movie. It would challenge the guy to see if he's worthy of seducing the girl.' "